


Magpie, To The Seaside

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Lovecraftian, M/M, no tentacle sex though, season 6 AU, some tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-28
Updated: 2013-12-28
Packaged: 2018-01-06 12:52:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Him and Dean, a house trailer by the sea, peaceful mornings recuperating from being ensouled—Sam could live with this, if only it weren’t for the uninvited visitor knocking at their door at midnight, every night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magpie, To The Seaside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cordelia_gray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordelia_gray/gifts).



> Written for spn_j2_xmas as a gift for cordelia_gray who prompted "strange days, stranger nights", "infinite universes" and "dreamlands." and mentioned "unusual domesticity" as one of her likes. Hope you like this, and Happy Holidays ♥ ♥

_Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed_

_In one self place, for where we are is hell,_

_And where hell is there must we ever be._

-          “Dr. Faustus”, Christopher Marlowe

1.

It’s Monday when Sam wakes up.

He wakes on the crumbling brink of panic, and he teeters on the edge for ever before he takes a  breath, a rush of air into burning lungs. His head feels strangely empty, scraped clean with a toothbrush, a strange buzzing in his brain like excited hornets. Sam sucks in breaths like a suffocating fish thrown back in the water. He counts: _first breath for the mother, the second for God, and the third for the Raven._ The air is thick, heavy with saltwater and ozone, mud-flat stink of fish and mildew. _Fourth is for the father, fifth for the sister._ Tinnitus fades and sound rushes inwards in its stead. Now his head feels like a balloon, slowly filling up with blood. Somewhere there’s a sea, rolling slow and sure, a sleeping Titan. Somewhere else a radio, song unclear. And closer, much closer, there’s a voice saying his name. _Sixth is for the brother,_ Sam thinks. He holds that breath. He says, “ _Dean_?”

It comes out a zombified rasp.

“Sammy,” says Dean. His fingers are pressing too hard into Sam’s wrist. Dean’s counting too. Sam can feel his pulse pounding against Dean’s touch. “Sam,” he says again, and then he can’t seem to stop saying it.

Sight is the very last sense a newborn comprehends, tagging behind pain and noise and hunger and fear. Sam opens his eyes, blinking to focus, turning his head away from white light fracturing across his vision.

“Hey.”

Dean is rubbing a dinosaur-shaped sponge over Sam’s forehead, the sponge colored a bright purple and darkening. Sam tries to bat his hand away; all _leave me alone,_ because Dean needs dino-sponges as much as him. Dean is bleeding, a cut on his forehead, a split lip, a tear in the skin along his jaw. He looks like he’s been dragged through a battlefield. His hair sticks up in octopus tufts. He’s also dripping wet.

Sam has no fucking idea what’s happened.

In fact, he has no fucking idea how Dean is even here, wide-eyed and manhandling him with sponges, because the last thing Sam remembers is the field. And then he fell. And there was white light and Lucifer yelling in his head.

Dean blinks panicked Morse code. Sam fights with sweat-damp bed sheets, trying to sit up, but Dean pushes him back down.

“I feel better,” Sam says, shaky, reaching out to grab fistfuls of Dean’s jacket, wanting to make sure he was real. Dean opens his mouth but nothing comes out, just the shape of “ _Sam”,_ and then he hugs Sam tight, curls a fist in his hair and mumbles nonsense in his ear like Sam’s five and he’s just fallen off the swings near some Motel 6 parking lot.

Sam wonders what ghosts and what underworld Dean has just barreled through. He wonders if Hell is a beehive, and if it is, he wonders if they’ve both stirred it. There’s a buzzing in his head, distant and syncopated with the roar of the sea, but he ignores it, closes his eyes, and forgets what it’s like to be one person rather than this braided two.

“It’ll be okay,” Dean says, voice wrenched and hollow, already making promises he can’t keep. “It’ll be okay.”

2.

The sea is rough here.

At night it’s so close and so loud that Sam thinks one wave will be enough to sweep them out amidst the rocks. He has fantastic nightmares of saltwater filling up the dented aluminum house-trailer. He wakes to chrome skies and a sun that makes less effort each passing day. Light spills anemic over the grey Pacific and the grayer sand, swims in pinstripes through the trailer’s Plexiglas windows. Dean warms his hands on chipped coffee mugs, many times a day and always drinking it black as a coalmine; wishes aloud that the weather get a handle on itself already.

The beach is crescent-shaped, parenthesized by ancient sandstone and shale bluffs. The rasp and roar of the waves is the soundtrack to which they build their new, domesticated routine.

Sam wanders the sea-side every morning; wonders what’s wrong with the seagulls here that they never seem to make a noise. The craggy rocks by the breakers teem with their watchful numbers, but all they do is stare. Endless staring, at the place where the sky and sea meet seamlessly, at the waves shattering their bones on the rocks, at Sam in his thin clothes with the whistling wind tugging his hair awry.

He wonders if it’s something about him; if he carries the dregs of his tenure in Hell like a miasma. He wonders if it’s _more,_ if the sea itself is offending the birds somehow, charcoal-wave cold and whispering like a demon.

“Squawk or something. Motherfucking birds.”

He throws a piece of driftwood in their general direction and immediately feels like a dick.

They just stare.

Sam and Dean and the Impala are half a mile off an Interstate that winds through the altars of sacred sequoia, past glimpses of nameless narrow beaches, all the way to San Francisco. At night Sam has visions of that giant orange cathedral, the Golden Gate, as if it’s some distant unreachable dream. He wakes from shapeless nightmares that leave him sweating and breathless to the sight of Dean checking his guns, assembling and disassembling them, rock salt shells replaced by gunpowder, yew root and bone ash.

Sam watches Dean and his helpless paranoia and wishes he, Sam, wasn’t stranded down here, on the ground, while Dean stayed on top of his ladder rung with his secrets.

“Rule number one,” Dean had said, two days after Sam woke, “and you need to follow this one for me, Sammy, because I can’t even begin to tell you how important this is. Okay?”

Sam, curled on the tiny couch in the main room of the trailer, had barely looked up from his book. It was a hardback chapbook, _The Colour Out of Space,_ and it was Dean’s. Go figure.

“Don’t let anything in,” Dean said.

“In what?”

“In the trailer. Unless you know it’s me. Don’t open the door.”

Sam smirked; half-formed thoughts of Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs circling the drain in his head. _Don’t open the door or the witch will get you. With her comb, her lace, her poisoned apple shard._

“What do you mean? There’s nothing near us for miles,” he said. “Is someone looking for us?”

“Nothing’s looking for us. Just—promise me.”

Sam felt his mouth twist in refusal, but the buzzing stopped him. It was never-ending, a mini-sea in his own head, and something about it was stopping him from bugging Dean and demanding all the answers. He had a whole plethora of questions. How come Sam was here. How come he was, in most senses of the word, _okay._ How come they were so far from civilization and not leaving yet. What had he done when he was, apparently, _soulless._ The questions accumulated like dirty dishes at the back of his mind. The buzzing swept them all out to sea.

 _This is bigger than us,_ Sam thought. _Whatever this secret is._ _Bigger than all of us._

3.

The knocking started that same night.

 _Boom,_ just after midnight. _Boom. Boom._

 Sam woke panicked and breathless, hands thrown out against a faceless threat, heart hammering in his chest for a full minute before he calmed down and recognized the cramped bedroom he shared with Dean. Something wailed outside, in a strange language, in more than plain wordless stridency. Sam perked his ears, caught a word that was maybe _please._

“What the hell is that?” he said in a loud whisper.

“Sssh,” hissed Dean. In the grayish light, he was nothing more than a dark shape on his narrow bed, reaching under the pillow for a darker shape. Sam pushed his blankets away, reaching for his own knife.

 _Boom._ Cartoon-sharp and startling. _Boom. Boom._

Wind whistled shrill and insistent, ghostly fingers sneaking through gaps in the trailer walls, through the seam beneath the Plexiglas windows. Outside, the sea roared the tongue of madness.

 “Dean—”

“It’s nothing.”

“Sorry, man, but it _really_ doesn’t sound like _nothing._ ”

Dean sighed, scrubbed his face with his hand. “What does it sound like to you?”

“Like something wants in.”

He heard the familiar sound of a six-shot cylinder flipping open, chambers being filled, snapped shut again.

“Maybe it’s coming for me.” Sam said. “Whatever it is, maybe—maybe it doesn’t like whatever you did to get me back—”

“Oh, shut up, Sam,” Dean said, in exasperation. “If it doesn’t like what _I_ did, it can have _me_.”

“Maybe it wants _me_ back.”

 _Maybe it’s Lucifer,_ Sam didn’t say. _Maybe something worse._

 _Maybe, maybe, maybe_. The word was his earworm, the shape of the buzzing in his head.

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Doesn’t sound so dumb to me.”

A beat of silence, then: “Sammy, this has nothing to do with you.”

Sam made a face at his knees. “You have to give me more than _‘it’s nothing’_ , Dean,” he said, solemnly. He flicked on a flashlight and the light spread out white and sharp, bouncing off the metal walls. It illuminated Dean briefly, sitting up with his hands splayed over his knees. Despite their evident strength, they looked like poor, soft things.

 _Boom,_ complained the uninvited guest.

“There are—,” Dean started, and then coughed into the crook of his elbow, clearing his throat. “—rifts. In the world, I mean. Kinda like—”

“ _The_ _Call_ _of_ _Cthulhu_?” Sam asked, snorting.

“ _Exactly_ like _The_ _Call_ _of_ _Cthulhu_. Breaches, Sam. And they lead places. And sometimes there’s something on the other side, that you shouldn’t let out—”

 “And that’s what’s knocking at our door? A deep-space, deep-sea monster? Mothra from beneath the sea? _Seriously?_ ”

These were strange days that beget stranger nights. These were things that stretched the boundary of his belief, way beyond its already warped and ragged threshold. He listened to the sea dragging itself enthusiastically over mossy rocks, too close, too loud. _I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering._ Who said that? Someone did, ages ago. Sam shuddered.

“Just don’t let it in,” Dean said, and his voice was tired, a stranger’s voice, not the voice of someone Sam loved.

“You have to give me more than that, Dean.”

 _Boom,_ from outside, like a cannon shot.

Dean had looked away for the longest time, at the darkest corners in the room. Then, very slowly, he had nodded.

4.

Once Dean gives him the video, Sam kinda goes crazy and watches it again and again. He doesn’t know why. Looking for clues, maybe. Wondering. If he plays it often enough, would it change?

The MSST undersea vehicle’s early July feed hit the hunter circuit a few weeks after Sam and Dean helped burn down Crowley’s little prison. Sam doesn’t remember that. Sam also doesn’t remember Dean sourcing the video from a hunter based off Connecticut. Dean hadn’t gone looking for it. A probable hunt in Bristol that turned “strange”, a need to get a drink (and maybe get away from Replicant Sam), and Chantel Morrow had sauntered up to Dean in a bar somewhere in the nameless stretch between Ipswich and Rowley. Talking of monsters and their changing behavioral patterns like they were a fucking ecology project, mentioning the MSST and their “Weird new video of the Pacific seafloor. Did you see it?”

( _Only Chantel,_ Dean had said, shaking his head. He should have been fucking hunting. Fucking. Hunting. Not watching undersea exploration videos. _But Chantel…_ )

Sam watches the entire 53 minutes of feed once every day. When he reaches the end, he rewinds the VCR tape to the beginning. Then he sits very, very still, waiting for his head to settle, for the white flashes and yawning terror to subside. Having a cold beer in his hand helps. Sometimes, if Dean isn’t around, Sam doesn’t care if it’s the ass-crack of dawn or not—a shot of Jack is the best medicine.

 ( _Took a bit of wrangling to get them to tell me where exactly the video was taken. But we got it done, man. Bobby and me, though I didn’t tell him_ why. _I didn’t tell_ you _why either.)_

Yeah, of course. Sam understands. He doesn’t exactly remember this soulless character, but _he_ sure wasn’t fun, going from the way Dean evades all talk on the subject.

In the video, the first half an hour is just snow and underwater seascape—canyons and rocks, spongy sea-anemones, dark benthic fish darting blindly away from the VideoRay ROV’s six brilliant lights. Sea greenery drifts from the edges of rocky outcroppings. Dust and detritus and phytoplankton whirl into thick marine snow that obfuscates the camera. For the next fifteen minutes or so, there is nothing but snow and unearthly silence.

The last seven minutes is when Sam forgets to breathe.

On the TV, the ROV tilts precipitously to the left and a cloud of undersea detritus blocks the starboard camera view. The ancient VCR sputters and the video stills for a moment before continuing, showing boulders and spongy green algae, ridges rising out of the ooze that have been there since primordial times.

The VCR tape unspools towards its end. Just 1:03 minutes of video left. The ROV careens sharply to the right, and now a bit of seafloor is visible. Through the murk and the snow, falling faster than ever, Sam glimpses brilliant light. Light, coming out of the seafloor. And as the ROV pulls up, reeled back on its umbilical cord to safer depths, he can see the shape of it.

It’s plainly, _unmistakably,_ Enochian.

Shimmering on the seafloor, words written in a circle, like the _open sesame_ to some parallel universe.

It’s familiar. The shape of these words. The taste of them on his lips when he tries saying them out, very softly, so as to not curse anything. Last time he said this, Sam wasn’t Sam. Sam was in Detroit, closing a hole that Dean made in a wall.

These are the words to close Lucifer’s Cage.

5.

“Tell me about it,” Sam says, when it’s a Monday again and they’re walking on the beach. The tide’s out, leaving behind tiny pools of fishes and salt-washed crabs, barnacles sticking to rocks and colorful mollusks trapped in the sand. Under their bare feet, sand slips away bit by bit.

Dean has the day off. From what, exactly, Sam still isn’t sure, though he’s certain it has to do with repairing stuff. Sam’s job is to survive the two months of R&R time before they hit the road without falling apart. Which is stupid, really, because it’s been two weeks. If he was going to be a drooling mess on the floor, he’d be there by now. The monster knocking at the door every night is certainly doing no good to his sanity.

“About what?”

“Everything. Your year. What it was like. What _I_ was like. How you got me out, exactly—”

Dean makes a strangled noise. “Sam.”

“No, yeah, I get it. It’s too good to be true. _I’m_ too good to be true. Say it out loud and you curse the good luck, or something like that, right? But Dean, it’s okay. I’m _okay._ And I need to know.”

Dean frowns, eyebrows pulling together, his lips a thin line. “Are you really, though. _Okay_? One hundred percent?”

“That’s an unfair question,” Sam laughs, humorlessly. “ _Okay_ is pretty relative. Or subjective. One of those, I don’t know. There’s still the buzzing in my head—whatever that is. There’s the thing knocking at night—”

“That has nothing to do with you,” Dean sighs. He leans to pick up a piece of sea-glass, looks through and passes it over to Sam, then sits down on a rock facing out to sea. Wind rushes cold and damp, chilling Sam, gluing his jacket collar to his chin.

“Look, Sam. You were downstairs for a year and a half. From where I’m sitting, you shouldn’t even be functional, man. But you are. That’s an _awesome_ thing. Maybe we’re finally beating the Winchester luck, you know? ‘Bout time, if you ask me.”

Sam snorts, glancing at the waves. They’re climbing higher now, hungrier, salt spray drenching both brothers. “When is it ever that easy?”

“This time. Maybe?” Dean says, hopefully. Weak sunlight plays dim in his eyes, and Sam can’t quite read the expression on his face.

“And you didn’t give up anything,” Sam prompts, impatiently. He clenches his fists against his sides, finds it better to lock himself up with his arms folded over his chest instead. Wind whips his voice faint. “Nothing’s going to come and tear you to pieces. Right, Dean? Nothing’s going to leave _me_ whole and take you instead.”

Dean flinches, turning his head away.

Sam wants to be frustrated. Sam wants this game to end, and for the whole story with all its details to be laid out in front of him. Sam wants the buzzing to stop, for the thing to stop knocking at night. Instead, he moves closer to Dean, sits beside him on the rock.

 “Nothing’s going to take you away?” Sam says, insistent.

He watches Dean, the shape of his mouth and his downturned gaze, trying to gauge his silence. A strange awareness creeps up Sam’s spine, sparkles at the edges of his vision. All of a sudden the world is too restful, too quiet except for the sea. Their knees are almost touching. Sam frowns at the negative space and inches closer with the smallest brushstroke movements.

He looks at Dean through the piece of sea-glass.

“What?”

“Huh,” he says. The back of his neck feels too hot, his skin too tight. “You’re all green.”

Dean swallows and Sam watches the movement of his throat. His thoughts are formless, twisting hotly around his brother. A small spur of nostalgia— or maybe déjà vu’s the better word—and maybe it’s the same for Dean, because he reaches up and tugs away the distorting glass.

Now Sam can’t hide. Now Sam’s just _there,_ confusing thoughts and all, right there for Dean to see.

“We should.” Sam starts; stops. Tide’s coming in, they need to head back. That’s what he wants to say. He feels weirdly dizzy and paranoid, like the world just went askew, as fast and easy as a painting leaning the wrong way.

“Yeah,” Dean says, because he’s Dean and he knows to finish what Sam doesn’t say. Most of the time.

They don’t misunderstand each other unless the world is at stake.

6.

Sam keeps the piece of sea-glass.

It sits on a foldable table near the trailer’s blink-and-you-miss-it kitchen, right in front of a calendar advertising Camel cigarettes and a funny-looking Native artifact that might be Ohlone. Red X’s adorn most of the calendar. There are no X’s since Sam’s return.

Dinner is out of cans, because a storm blows in and rattles ghostly fingers against the top of the trailer, odd crackling sounds like the world is an eggshell cracking open, and Sam won’t let Dean go out in that. No fucking way.

“Goddamn, I hate beans,” Dean mutters, and then he slouches on the couch watching some ridiculous late night double feature thing, all guns and guts and alien impregnation, while Sam curls up on a moth-eaten mattress on the floor with gunfire in his ears, doggedly plowing through the rest of _The Colour Out of Space._

“Move over,” Dean says, half an hour later, glassy-eyed with all his focus on the movie. Sam wriggles a bit to make a little space, and then there’s the same old tussle from their childhood, repeated only nine-thousand times in approximately one thousand motel beds—elbows and knees and ramming shoulders, Sam complaining and Dean grabbing a fistful of his hair and Sam jabbing two fingers between Dean’s ribs.

“Stop it, you bitch, I’m missing all the good parts!” Dean grunts, but the corners of his mouth flick up in a smile.

And they’re still there when midnight rolls in and the letters start swimming in front of Sam’s eyes. He puts the book down on his chest and watches the back of Dean’s head, the short hairs at his neck, his skin where the collar of his T-shirt hangs loose.

 _You didn’t put my brain back right,_ Sam thinks, crazy kind of heat in his gaze, tingling in his skin. He smashes his face into the mattress and gets a face-full of stale, wet smell. His heart is loud and wild and reckless, slingshotting against his chest. Sam wonders what it would be like to just pull Dean closer, closer than anatomy allowed, swallow his warmth. The notion curls hot and nasty inside him.

 _Shut up,_ Sam tells his brain. He smiles and is vaguely horrified at himself. He’s warm and peaceful, giddy from being half-asleep. At this moment, he feels sewn to Dean, like he couldn’t get away if he wanted to. It’s a good feeling.

On the TV, someone gets their head bitten off by something that looks like a cross between a crocodile and a griffin. Dean snickers and whispers “Gotcha, you sonofabitch.”

 _Sheep,_ Sam thinks, unwilling to get up and find his bed. His sheep are easy to come by tonight, lining up to jump over the fence, but there are only three of them before night falls on their fields of pampas grass.

When Sam wakes again it’s because of the thing knocking at the door, and Dean’s asleep next to him, completely conked out from his movie marathon, drooling on a pillow that he must have brought in.

Half-asleep, Sam drags himself to his feet and takes a step towards the door. Then another. He’s at it before he can really comprehend what he’s doing.

 _Boom,_ goes the door.

The thing on the other side smells like the sea. Like salt and rust, like neglect. The door could be an entire world—a space vast and hopelessly huge, light years separating Sam from the thing outside—but he’d still feel the electric charge between them, still feel the tingling in his fingertips like he’s a human conduit for something otherworldly.

Like he isn’t even real, just something to beach this creature every night.

_What do you want? What do you need?_

The thing outside makes a wet, strangling sound. Sam swallows, takes a slow, deep breath. He looks back at Dean, sleeping on his stomach with his shirt rucked up and a dream unspooling beneath his faintly flickering eyelids.

 _What do you want?_ Sam thinks, and raises his hand halfway to press his palm to the door.

_YOU._

Hornets in his brain, buzzing. Sam stands, looking at a thin, innocent white door, his heart thudding in his chest and every fiber in his body telling him to run, to hide, _survive,_ goddammit.

 _Magpie’s flown its nest,_ the thing tells him, mournfully. _Magpie’s flown its nest. Left all shiny bits behind._

“I don’t know what that means.”

_Look at me, Sam._

“No,” Sam gasps. The breath is punched out of him, or maybe it’s just that he’s forgotten how to draw air into his lungs.

It wails then— louder, louder than ever—and Sam feels it all, every octave and syllable, feels it in his bones and his scars and the blood turning to ice in his veins. He reaches out his hand again, the door just fingertips away, but the space seems to writhe and double, triple, and Sam will _never_ reach it, will never—

 _You need me,_ the thing says, moaning.

Dazzling dream or not, the burn of the door when Sam’s hand touches it is _very_ real, hot like hellfire, and he can’t pull his hand away. He screams and pulls, and now the thing is laughing, hysterical, sobbing laughter.

  _Sorry, sorry, sorry, Sam, but—_

_You. Need. Me._

All the world’s a gyre around him, the trailer seeming to spin, everything seeming to spin. There’s nothing to hold onto, just a slow, inevitable fall. Waves lash at him, and some of them are aflame. _Paradox,_ he thinks, and chokes on a mouthful of steaming water. Something large and monstrous rises into the air, shattering drops of water against a moonlit night, and it’s only part of the monster, only a fraction, for the monster is the sea itself, has _always_ been. And for a second he thinks he sees his own face, in the depths and mottled by the water above him, blue-shine in his eyes.  

Sam yells out, _D-E-A-N_ like a punched-out SOS, and the word floats from his lips and spins down into the depths, where it fits into some lock in the universe, fits perfectly, rips open a hole on the sea-floor.  A dazzling hole, down below, and something clambers out of it, something bright—something that shouldn’t.

 _I told you,_ Sam thinks, deliriously. _I told you to leave it alone, Dean._

7.

_Two Weeks Ago._

“Leave it alone. Dean. Leave it _alone._ ”

Dean was not listening. Dean was not _going_ to listen. Dean was pretending Sam didn’t exist, that he couldn’t think for himself, that he was Pinocchio with his strings cut. Dean was going to get Sam’s soul back. He had a spell, four rings, a Bird Man and a hole in the sea.

“You’re going to kill me, Dean!”

The mirrors on the walls reflected a thousand morose Deans.

Sordid stone affair, this house. This stupid fucking house that Dean had found, following the MSST video trail. In the mornings it doubled as a haunted house attraction for the aimless and vandals, sitting just past a grassy field and a gravel path, barely five minutes from the highway. There was no one here at night, no punk kids rolling up in battered sedans to splatter the walls with graffiti, no squealing girls daring each other to open each door. Only the wind, salt-scented, and the stench of a house long neglected.

In the second floor bathroom, Sam rattled his handcuffs against the iron plumbing and wondered if this was how haunted house rumors started: with men that cuffed their brothers to pipes and headed down to a hole in the sea.

“Are you sure? What we’re attempting—it could be dangerous.”

This was the Bird Man. That was what Sam called him anyway—the weirdo Native Indian who claimed he knew where the hole was. He wore _feathers;_ it was a wonder how Dean had the balls to trust this guy.

Dean should be sitting around being conflicted and making constipated faces, but this is _his chance,_ he kept saying. To get _his_ Sam back.

“Yeah, Dean. _Dangerous._ You wanna shove that thing back in me? Might as well put a bullet through my head yourself. Be quicker. Same results.”

Dean’s feet spun on the dirty green mosaic of the bathroom floor. He looked at Sam and Sam smirked at him, rattling the cuff once more. He had one hand free, which was a stupid move on Dean’s part. Sam thought Dean wasn’t as sure as he said he was, would probably appreciate Sam breaking out now and bashing his head in so he didn’t have to make the choice. Sam would be happy to oblige, actually, soon as he figured out how to get out of this shackle.

“I’m sure,” Dean said, all guilty glances and shoe-gazing. “Now or never.”

“Come then,” the Bird Man said. He fixed Sam with unblinking sloe eyes, wrinkled face souring. _Empty eyes,_ he’d kept saying all the way here. _No soul._

Sam sneered at him. “What did he say he’d give you, old man? We’re broke, if you want the honest truth.”

“That’s between him and me.”

Sam barked a laugh. “Ah. Is it _that_ kind of a favor? I’ll give it to you, dude. You aren’t robbing yourself.”

The Bird Man threw him a last scathing look before disappearing out the door. Dean’s boots echoed loudly as he moved to follow.

“Hey,” Sam called, quietly. “You’re not gonna kiss me goodbye? Might not get another chance, Dean.”

Sam didn’t expect him to come back, but Dean did. Leaning down, close, Dean whispered, “You need your soul back, Sam. Trust me. I won’t do anything that’ll hurt you.”

“How do you know?” Sam asked, grabbing the collar of Dean’s jacket. The handcuff rattled with the force. “You _don’t_ know. You don’t know what you’re gonna find out there, and you don’t know what that’s going to do to you—to _me._ You don’t know anything, Dean. Get me out of this thing, and leave this alone _._ You’re in way over your head.”

“I can’t,” Dean told him, his face tense, wrenched as if he was in physical pain, lips thinning to a line, “I can’t leave him in there, in hell. I can’t live with that, Sam. You—you have to forgive me for saving my brother.”

Sam dragged his gaze across Dean’s face. His chin and his lips, the smattering of freckles on his cheeks. His eyes had that unholy absinthe glint, and they were full of things Sam would rather not see. Pity and sorrow, love and helplessness, stupid hero-gleam and pain. It was as if he wished he could just claw out whole chunks of time, erase _this_ Sam so only his Sam is left, until _he_ came back, his brother, _his_ , and things will be right again, and this will all end, will all just _stop_.

Sam whispered. “You don’t want to do this, Dean. Please.”

Sam smoothed his free-hand over Dean’s face, tilted it to him, pushing his nails into Dean’s skin. Dean hissed but didn’t pull away. He never pulled away. He never wanted Sam to speak, never wanted him to break whatever illusion he’d conjured up for himself to explain this fucked-up, crazy, impossible thing between them—but he _never_ pulled away.

Sam kissed him. Niceties weren’t really Sam’s thing, but desperate times and all that jazz, but Dean’s mouth opened underneath his, pliable and warm. Sam nipped at his lip, dug his nails in harder. Tiny drops of blood showed— real, red. Dean had a palm against Sam’s chest, splayed out like a five-pointed star, but he wasn’t pushing him away, so Sam kissed his jaw, his cheek, the blood; tugged gently at his earlobe with his teeth.

“This is easier?” Sam whispered, sing-song cadence as Dean pushed a hand through Sam’s hair, tangling hard enough that pain stung wetly in Sam’s eyes, made him hiss, arch forward seeking more. Dean seized his face and the kiss between them was rough, ungainly, hungry like quick goodbye. Sam tasted sweetness and salt, pulled away to break the rule, the illusion.

“Don’t you think so? I am easier. _We_ are easier.”

 _You’ll say anything,_ Dean’s eyes said, but Sam could see the thought, black as hope, circling, circling, until Dean finally shook his head.

“That’s exactly why,” Dean said, bitter smile and hope, slipping away before Sam could decide if it was possible to knock him out with just one hand. “Exactly why I have to.”

8.

It’s Tuesday morning in the trailer by the sea.

Sam draws pictures on spilled salt, and Dean disappears on a supply run. “Get me a breakfast burrito,” is the only thing Sam has said to him. They aren’t really talking, but it isn’t really a fight. Sam just can’t deal with the strange kaleidoscopic flashes of last year with Dean in the same room. What does he even say? _I’m sorry, but there’s a scratchy movie playing in my head. We’re starring. And some of it is not PG._

He looks at the makeshift bandage around his hand, pokes at it and wonders what the wound looks like. Sam woke up on his back on the floor two hours after getting zapped by the door, his hand wrapped up with gauze and duct tape, Dean hovering terrified.

Something had happened when he touched that door. Something he couldn’t put to words. Whatever it was, here Sam was, blinking his eyes against last year. Last year, which he’d lost, so easily, like a quarter through the bars of a drain grate.

 _Blink._ Samuel. _Blink._ Christian. _Blink._ Dean.

He makes an Amazonian’s shape on the salt and watches dust and condensation turn sludgy grey on the trailer’s window. The sea is lashing, furious. It’s so unreal. All of it, this truncated world of sea and shadows, these glimpses of new strange things, even Dean, even Sam. All so unreal.

 _I just got back,_ he thinks. _Why does everything have to be so weird?_

Lives like theirs, you could end up dead any day, end up worse, spat down the slick gullet of Hell or Heaven or an infinite number of universes. Incest hardly ranks. They’ve pushed boundaries. Once or twice, never really thinking anything through, mostly just blurry half-drunk memories to laugh about. Nothing real _._ Until, apparently, last year. He doesn’t know whether to be pissed or bewildered or relieved.

Sam can’t do this right now, can’t think, can’t confront. He blinks his eyes, shakes his head to try and clear the continuous white noise.

Dean comes banging in, wind-chapped and blinking at the progression from sunlight to the diffused darkness of the trailer. He stops when he sees Sam.

“You— uh, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Sam says. It comes out growly and he winces. He blows apart his salt-Amazonian, leaving only her thighs. “This trailer. Does it belong to the Ohlone man?”

“You remember him?”

“In flashes. I know he’s the one who led us to that house. Is it close?”

Dean scrubs a hand over his face. “Just on the other side of the cliff. Nearer to the lighthouse.”

Sam’s seen the candy-cane lighthouse high up on the sandstone bluffs. It’s not that far. “Can we go there?”

Dean shakes his head, his eyes cast down and eyebrows pulled up. It’s a look that bothers Sam. “It’s not a good place. For anyone.”

“What’s there?” Sam presses, urgently. “Why don’t you just tell me? Cut it out with the only-what-you-need-to-know attitude, Dean, this involves me. I deserve to know.”

Dean doesn’t say anything for a long moment. His face is set and still, light razoring across his cheekbones and throwing shadows that make him look tired. Just as Sam’s opening his mouth again, planning to bitch at him till Dean gave in, Dean moves, opening a little cubbyhole hidden in the wall. He brings out what looks like a blueprint, spreads it over the table. He presses his finger to the bottom of the print, to where it looks like the basement drops away, and an arrow mark points to _Caverns._

“Under that house, there’s a path. Take a boat and you can row right into an underground chain of caverns, what locals here call the Bottomless Pits, the same one that ROV was investigating. The Ohlone man owed me a favor, from ages ago. When I found out he knew the caverns better than anyone else, I called it.”

“And what was the hole? A breach, like you said? Backdoor entrance to the Cage?”

Dean shrugs. “Hey, I know only as much as you do. Hell’s not exactly _a place._ Seems likely that it’d have little portals in faraway places, like the bottom of the sea.” He pushed a hand through his hair and flashed Sam a quick, sad smile. “Sammy. I can’t even explain it. It seemed—it seemed like the world was trying to tell me something, you know? That I’d see that video, that I’d know what those words meant… The Ohlone dude—his name’s Lorenzo— told me that the caverns lit up for three whole nights a year and a half ago. Caused a major local hoopla—you know, homegrown Ripley’s Believe It or Not— and then it brought the MSST, looking for glowing eels—and I thought, maybe, just _maybe_ —it could all be connected? If maybe when—whoever it was that got you out in the first place did it, all the portals lit up? If maybe _this_ one was the actual door they used to get in, get you and get out. There was a word for it—Bobby said—something. Syn. Sync—?”

“Synchronicity?” Sam snorts, cutting him a hard glance. Dean meets his gaze with a flat, trance-like look. “Yeah, I don’t know. To me it looks more like the universe saying _stop, leave it be, you’re about to push the big fucking red button._ Dean, did it cross your mind that you could have let Lucifer out?”

Dean huffs, dropping into the couch. “I was careful. I found a spell…” His shoulders are taut, his back stiff. The creases at his eyes seem to speak of longing and choices and stumbling blindly in the dark. Something in Sam’s heart snaps.

“Okay,” he says, softly. “Okay, so you found a backdoor. You got me out. What about the monster?”

Dean deflates like a needled balloon. “I don’t know what it is, Sam. I just—I know it isn’t a well-wisher. I know I can’t open the door when it’s knocking.”

“I think it lives in the house,” Sam says. “Only comes out at night. Or we’d have seen it.”

Dean lets out his breath in a whoosh, leaning over with his hands on his knees. There’s a wrenched, defeated tone in his voice when he says, “I _know_ it lives in the house. We just—we have to hope it goes away.”

Sam takes a deep breath. “Why don’t _we_ go away? We could just go. I _want_ to go.”

Dean only shakes his head, no words left in him. His eyes flit casually to the trailer door, which doesn’t exactly fit to its frame right now. Sam wonders if he’s going to fix it, or ask Sam why he’d mess with it, but Dean only nods—like this is inevitable.

9.

Sam’s lying on top of the bed sheets when Dean gets back with dinner that night. It’s too hot for anything else, though he’d also like to crawl under the covers. His skin feels hot and cold at the same time, and the buzzing in his head is worse. It feels like he is unspooling. Like shrinking, like he’ll never be warm or full or strong again. He wonders if this is how the monster feels all the time.

 _Magpie’s flown its nest,_ he thinks. _Left all shiny bits behind._

Dean opens the door to the bedroom, drops his jacket on his bed.

“I took off the bandage,” Sam says.

“Yeah? Let me see.”

Sam frowns. “I think maybe it infected me or something. I don’t know. I only touched the door…”

“Sssh. Let me look. Sammy—”

Sam keeps that hand firmly twined into the fabric of his shirt. The bed dips with Dean’s weight and then Dean’s fingers are tugging at his hand, pulling it free.

“It’s like I’m not even real. It’s like I’m full of holes and the thing outside knows it, and it’s telling me something—”

Dean tries to touch the wound—not even a wound, really, if Sam could call it something he’d call it a _hole,_ perfectly black, perfectly round, the size of a dime—and Sam yanks his hand away.

“Don’t touch it.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“I don’t know. Just don’t touch it.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Okay.”

Sam wishes he wouldn’t look like that. Like he’d burned down the world. It’s starting to unnerve him. All of this, really. This is more than anything he’s had to face, because there is a slow realization burning at the back of his mind.

He wonders if he’s going about it wrong. If the buzzing is not a buzzing but static, static like a TV channel with the picture missing, with the soul un-whole. _Him_ un-whole.

He shakes his head when Dean tries to go away.

“Stay.”

There are these things you know when you’re Dean Winchester’s brother. That you will run, voluntarily or not. That he will chase, promises or not. You will always be equally surprised and frustrated. You will always be a fool. You will always be saved, whether you want it or not, and it will always be like having your throat slashed, just that quick, _and_ getting the world and all that’s worth living for handed back to you at the same time.

And somehow, in the end, you will always say, “Stay.”

10.

When the monster knocks at night, Sam wakes up with his heart thudding. Dean registers the sound with a weak grunt, but he must either be tired or pretending to be asleep—all he does is press a cold nose into the crook of Sam’s neck, near his ear.

Sam disentangles, gets out of bed and pads towards the door.

 _Part of a whole,_ the monster’s saying. _The sea is a beast._

Sam walks. Images lap against his consciousness. An empty boat, thudding against the rocks in an underground cavern. A _luchina,_ which is a pinecone tipped with coal and used as a candle, dropping into the water and keeping its flame even as it sinks to the depths. Four rings, from four Horsemen, and the words of a spell to accompany them. The waves lashing black, then indigo, then bright, bright and searing white as something opens far below. Oars dipping into water, the creak of them against rusting oarlocks, a shrill sound like an angel. A superheated pulse, from down below, the water in the cavern bubbling and frothing.

Sam stops at the door. He doesn’t touch, just leans close to the trailer wall and peeks through the sliver between the door and the frame, through which the wind wriggles cold and salty. The thing outside is mournful and bloated, its face crusted over with barnacles and seashells. A bullet-hole stands out starkly on its forehead. He catches a glimpse of trembling gills and barbels, long purpling arms that are not arms anymore but tendrils, tentacles.

 _I saw a golden gate,_ it says. _It spat us out._

“I know,” Sam whispers. The monster moves, and Sam sees feathers, a beaded chain, something blue and glowing lodged in its translucent chest.

It’s the Ohlone man. But he’s also more than that. Sam knows. Sam _knows._

“Tell me what you want. Tell me.”

 _Not whole,_ it says. _Come find me._

“I can’t do that.”

The thing wails then, loud sound that comes from a place deeper than its throat, deeper than simple screaming. Sam sits down on the trailer-floor, listening, until it goes away, still wailing.

11.

These are the things which cannot be put together, once broken.

Glass. Bubbles. Humpty Dumpty. Gemstones. Icicles. Virginity. Promises. Silence. Mystery.

Hearts mend, though. Bones mend. Sometimes relationships, but not always.

Do souls mend?

“Dean.”

It’s dawn. Dean’s sitting up in bed, disheveled, the shape of his mouth worn-in.

“You have to forgive me,” he says. “You have to forgive me for saving you.”

Sam links their hands, flops next to him. “You’re a jerk,” he announces.

“I know.”

“But you’re not sorry about the Ohlone man.”

“I don’t think I can be. I mean, I’m not ecstatic about what happened to him, I wish it’d gone a different way but I just—I had to do this. I had to get you out. When I had the chance. As long as I have the chance to save you, I will _always_ have to. You know that.”

Sam nods. They fall apart in different ways, but they’re each other’s linchpin. He can understand this.

“Will you tell me?” he asks. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

12.

In the basement of the house was a door that led to winding, rickety steps. At the bottom of the steps a dark pool, and there was a boat there, if you climbed over an outcropping of rocks.

Lorenzo went first, and Dean followed. _The spring tide has teeth,_ the old man had told him. _Come during the vernal equinox. It’s our best chance._ Dean had come. This was vernal equinox, what the old man had been counting down towards.

“A gate was opened,” he’d told Dean earlier. “It wasn’t shut right. Someone needs to close it, and it won’t be you, boy. My people have protected it for centuries. It is compromised now. I have to take the mantle.”

The cavern was limestone and shale, stone built up over centuries. Lightless, it seemed to go on forever. Dean didn’t dare breathe. The air was stale here, and phosphorescence streamed through the water. Just some kind of algae, but the effect was eerie. Lorenzo whistled loudly, and the cavern echoed his whistles, whispering it back to him again and again.

“Left,” he instructed, and Dean canted the boat left, rowed away from the blue openness he could see to the right and deeper into the dark.

Another whistle, setting all of Dean’s bones ringing, and _please,_ he thought, _just fucking stop,_ but this was about Sam. This was about Sam, and Sam was locked up rattling and spouting vile threats in a bathroom, and Sam was locked up in hell with the Devil, and fuck it if that didn’t mess up Dean more than any creepy whistling dude.

The whispers of the cavern multiplied. Lorenzo was stiff, quiet near the prow.

“It’s here,” he said. “Right here.”

He lit the _luchina._ He said the spell, and Dean gave him the rings. The sea-floor lit up, so bright that Dean thought he’d go blind.

“Let’s hope this works,” Lorenzo said, and jumped into the water.

Dean waited. He waited a long time, blinded by the light, deafened by the shrill shrieking sound of angelic vibration. He thought of nothing, did nothing, every thought blown to ashes. It seemed like _hours_ before the craziness started.

The first thing he noticed was that the sea seemed to be bubbling. Dean touched the water and bit back a low cry. The sea was boiling. A superheated pulse rocketed from beneath and spun the boat, water rushing and surging through the cavern. The oars clattered against their locks and the world tumbled, spun, smashed at Dean, above and below and into him, pushed the boat against the rocks.

He got thrown out, gasping, grabbed the lip of a rock and stayed off the water. He locked a thigh against the side of the boat, scraped his face and arms clambering back in.

Something rose from the depths, a whip, an octopus-like tentacle. Lorenzo was in that maelstrom, face warped, and it was as if the sea was taking him for its own, twisting him into what it wanted him to be. The light was still blinding, still white, but there was also the brightest blue in all that white, Lorenzo putting out webbing fingers, reaching out to Dean with his prize.

Lorenzo shouted something. It came out a brayed gurgle, but Dean caught his words just the same.

_I can’t hold it together._

This was a risk they knew about. The human soul was not a rubber ball after all.  An eggshell crack spidered over it.

_Dean. I can’t hold it together._

And Dean lunged for it. The maelstrom spun Lorenzo up, threw him forward and he screamed, long terrible scream, and the light was dying now, the gate closing, having found and twisted its gatekeeper into the form of its key. Dean lunged for his brother’s soul, at the same time shooting Lorenzo thrice—twice in the chest, once in his forehead, just to put the poor man out of his misery.

The soul cleaved.

 _God, no,_ thought Dean, _not after all this._  

Later, he won’t wish he’d been faster. He won’t wish it away that he’d managed to save the part of Sam’s soul that was salvageable, that didn’t get torn apart in hell. He won’t wish it away that when the sea pushed him farther out, away from Lorenzo who didn’t seem to mind bullets anymore, away from the sea-ruined man climbing onto a shelf of shale, he caught a glimpse of the brightest blue right there— right there in him.

Later—when after Dean got Sam out of the house and to Lorenzo’s trailer, and Sam woke and seemed okay and didn’t remember hell—later Dean would come back to the house on the cliffs, the house with the basement. There would be thumping from the basement and he would ask— _Can you talk? Can you say something? Tell me what to do to help you, man._

And what was Lorenzo would say, _Dean, Dean, you don’t know what I see. Part of a whole, be glad, be glad. All I have is fire, blisters, the Dragon._

 _Be glad,_ it says, but also: _Put me back, put me back._

Dean would stop going there in a day or so, so then Lorenzo—and what was in him—would come looking for them instead.

13.

“You know I have to get it back.” Sam says. He’s looking at the hole in the middle of his hand. _Like a clue,_ he thinks. _I figured you out._ “It’s not going to stop knocking on our door till I take back what’s mine.”

He lay on his back, one hand folded over his chest, Dean sitting next to him Indian-style.

He is the monster. _He_ is the monster, the bit of him that shattered and remembered hell and now hurts inside the shell of something that belonged to the sea.

“It’ll probably kill you.”

Sam flicks a look at him, but then their eyes catch, quick as bait in the mouth of a fish.“I know. And I’m scared. I’m really fucking scared, but what’s the other option? Stay here, let that poor bastard drag himself to and from the house every day? And I don’t think—I don’t think pieces of your soul should be left lying around. And maybe when I have it back—maybe then I’ll feel whole. And the buzzing will stop, and this will heal,” Sam holds up his hand.

Maybe the soul is this many-layered thing, Sam thinks, and the universe is like this arrow that has to go through all of the layers, even the darkest ones, for it to belong to an actual person.

“I can’t,” Dean says, all broken-sounding. 

“Maybe I’ll be okay,” Sam says, like a prayer, then kisses Dean like prayers are something transferable, something to be shared like air or love.

Dean wraps a palm around the back of Sam’s neck; tugs him gently forward. They stay like that for a minute or so, waiting for the other to make a move, before Dean raises himself up with a rough groan, his fists tangling in Sam’s hair, mouth opening on his, hot and rough. He licks at the seam of Sam’s lips and Sam yields, letting him in, finding his own hands so he can touch Dean, his face, the roughness of his stubble, wrap his arms around him. He feels the tremors pass through Dean, the raggedness of Dean’s breathing.

“I can’t,” Dean says again, breathless, half a growl.

 _You will,_ Sam thinks. If Dean didn’t know it, he wouldn’t shake, his face tight and eyes smudged black, hungry and graceless and desperate. His hands wouldn’t be running in panic under Sam’s shirt, rucking it up and then all over Sam’s skin before clenching painfully on Sam’s shoulders like he’s shipwrecked, like he’s trying to anchor himself. He slides buttons out of stitched eyelets, scrapes nails over smooth skin, burns Sam with his lips. Sam bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from making a sound, hooks his fingers into Dean’s hips.

Sam kisses him like he’s drowning, like he’s fixing and being fixed, like the world outside is folding as the deck of cards it is—and it’s them, always, just them.

14.

At night, when the monster knocks, Sam stands on the other side of the door.

He feels it.

Under his hands he feels the faint scorch of dream-conjured fire, under his lips he tastes the ghosts of copper and ash and brimstone. In the shadows are strange horrors he doesn’t yet remember, and outside the door is something that has been down in a blind white cage for so long, _so_ _very_ _long,_ that it can only know itself down there.

But this is part of him too. This is part of who he is. This is Sam as much as he is Sam, and what right does he have to dictate which Sam survives?

It says nothing today. Maybe it feels him too.

Near dawn, Sam opens the door and walks down the gravel path.

He doesn’t look back at Dean.

Out in the sea, the thing that was once Lorenzo the Ohlone stands in the waves, moonlight sliding slick over the abalone nacre of its skin.

“There are things we need to do, that we can’t do by being hermits here,” Sam tells it, nearly yelling over the scream of the wind and the waves.

It stands there, quiet and disbelieving, yearning like a child for the jigsaw to fall right, for the key to click in the lock, because this here is Sam and it can scarcely believe it, this is Sam the flighty magpie, come back to claim the last tarnished bit.

“There are things _wrong_ out there, mess-ups, leftover crap from our own fuck-ups, a war in Heaven. Our friends are out there. Dean’ll have to go—”

Sam swallows. Shrugs at the creature, like he’s making silly small talk.

“And you know me,” Sam says. “You know why. I can’t leave my brother alone out there.”

He stops walking at the edge of the breakers and waits for whatever is next.

The sea is indigo and the stars are too many, indescribable, smattered all across the sky dome with no care or order. Far out, where the sea and sky meet, there is a red needle of light that throws scarlet shadows over the water. It’s nearly day, first day of the rest of his life however long that may be, and here on the beach the wind and the spray lift the feathery coat-thing Lorenzo is wearing around him.

They flutter, like wings without flight.

\- fin


End file.
